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Which Putin Will Emerge in New Presidency?

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, left, and President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia made a joint appearance at the congress of the ruling party in Moscow on Saturday.Credit
Natalia Kolesnikova/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

MOSCOW — We know Vladimir V. Putin will rule Russia for the foreseeable future. The question is, which Mr. Putin?

Will he be the reformer of 2001, who said the single most important measure of a country’s leaders is “how they protect citizens from the arbitrariness of racketeers, bandits and bribe-takers”? Or perhaps the man who called President George W. Bush on Sept. 11 before any other world leader?

Will he be the bully of the next year, who responded to a French reporter’s critical question about civilian casualties in Chechnya with a threat to circumcise him? Or the hawk of 2007, who stood on Red Square and compared United States foreign policy to that of the Third Reich?

Or even the conciliator of 2010, who knelt in the forest of Katyn to mourn 20,000 Polish officers massacred by the Soviet secret police at the start of World War II?

Mr. Putin, 58, has made many shifts since 1999, when, after a career in the shadows of Soviet intelligence agencies, he was selected to succeed Boris N. Yeltsin as Russia’s president. His transformations trace the fortunes of Russia itself, which rode the oil boom to become a defiant presence on the world stage and was thrust into deep uncertainty by the 2008 collapse of financial markets.

Putin 2.0, as some people are calling him, is unlikely to diverge drastically from the path set by President Dmitri A. Medvedev, who succeeded him in 2008 and sought to improve the business climate and reassure foreign investors. But Mr. Putin will most likely find it difficult to embrace reforms that devolve power away from the Kremlin, like the establishment of an independent judiciary, said Marat Guelman, who was a political operative and ally of Mr. Putin’s in the early 2000s.

“It’s not simple, because he will have to overcome what he did himself,” said Mr. Guelman, who now owns an art gallery in Moscow. “It is difficult to fight with yourself. It is a different Putin, but nevertheless it is the same. His type of management is vertical. That is the only way he knows how to manage. To manage something more complex, to take into account conflicting opinions — he never learned how to do it.”

At the outset of the “tandem” government three years ago, Mr. Medvedev made modernization his political brand, while Mr. Putin stood for stability. But Mr. Putin seems to be adjusting his message. On Monday, in his first appearance as the chosen presidential candidate, Mr. Putin ordered federal bodies to switch from paper to electronic documentation — a curious order from a man who, aides say, remains reluctant to use the Internet.

On Friday, the day before the announcement that he would be a candidate for president, Mr. Putin said leaders needed to listen to criticisms from human rights organizations. The remark was a little grudging, as he noted that rights campaigners “concern themselves with problems which do not affect a person’s everyday life,” in contrast to first-tier rights like salaries. But it was, at least, softer than his 2007 statement that they “scavenge like jackals at foreign embassies.”

Mr. Putin seems ready to throw his weight behind cooperation with Western European and American companies, as evidenced by the signing in August of a deal allowing Exxon to explore for oil in a Russian part of the Arctic Ocean. And Saturday left no doubt that Mr. Putin has supported the reset with the United States, a project publicly tied to Mr. Medvedev.

A far bigger question is whether Mr. Putin will tolerate pluralism. It was in his first presidency that he wrested control of television stations that criticized his policies, and he eliminated direct elections of governors and senators. He will return as president of a different country — one in which the population can get news from the Internet, the oil-fueled rise in living standards is ending, and the popularity of the ruling party, United Russia, is waning.

In fact, reform and authoritarianism are bound together in Mr. Putin’s view; the strong centralized governing style known as the “power vertical” was seen as necessary for reforms, said Aleksei V. Makarkin of the Center for Political Technologies, another research center in Moscow. The early Mr. Putin, he said, could fairly be compared to the czarist prime minister Pyotr Stolypin, who pushed through historic land reforms but executed so many of his rivals that the hangman’s noose became known as “Stolypin’s necktie.”

The second Mr. Putin, Mr. Makarkin said, dated from the 2003 arrest of the defiant oil tycoon Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, when the state strengthened its role in the economy; in 2005, Mr. Putin began to put up protections against popular uprisings like the one that had shaken Ukraine.

The third appeared after the 2008 financial crisis, when it became clear that Russia had no choice but to open up. The fourth, Mr. Makarkin predicted, will seek to preserve the political status quo while allowing economic reforms.

“I think actually it’s not four Putins — it’s the evolution of one person,” Mr. Makarkin said. “It’s the evolution of a person who came with one sense of what was necessary to do, and then felt those things were not enough to protect his power.”

In any case, a decade, or two decades, in the byzantine environment of the Russian power elite can have its own effect on a person. Alexander Rahr, who wrote a biography of Mr. Putin, recalled an impromptu invitation from the leader early in his presidency. By the time both were on their second vodka, Mr. Rahr said, the conversation had begun to feel “completely normal.” But that was a long time ago.

Now, Mr. Rahr said, “he would never meet with people like me simply to find out what people think.”

“He is surrounded by a byzantine kind of servants who praise him, who work this way: they praise the leader to get benefits and privileges for themselves,” said Mr. Rahr, of the German Council on Foreign Relations. “You need a very strong character to resist it, especially in a country like Russia. I hope he will manage it, with his own conscience.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 28, 2011, on Page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: Putin Returning to Presidency, Not Necessarily to Form. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe